


A Rare Jewel

by Cephalopod



Category: Oglaf
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 19:49:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cephalopod/pseuds/Cephalopod
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A party game at the castle goes terribly, magnificently wrong. Sandoval doesn't find what he's looking for but does find exactly what he wants.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Rare Jewel

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gargant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gargant/gifts).



It had been a good party, so far. The crudites on the sideboards, satisfyingly crude, were just now being swapped out for bowls of several different things that might broadly be described as sauces, and the rugs had been brought back in after a brief but thorough washing-up following the unpleasantness between the Gar vice-emissaries. The emissaries themselves had been seized by undulating medical personnel and ferried away through their hidden bolt-holes to the infirmary; the ambassadors would, in due course, be entirely de-charred. All was well.

“Subjects!” Mistress, one red-leathered foot on the seat of her throne and the other propped jauntily on the shoulder of her cupbearer, clapped her hands sharply for silence. Silence happened. Hundreds of eyes stared, compelled. Mistress's voice alone demanded attention, but so did the brilliant play of torchlight on her bejeweled codpiece.

“A game,” she said. She snapped her fingers, and the 'click' echoed in the rafters of the throne room. Several partygoers shifted uneasily.

“I've just hidden a pearl the size of a grape up someone's arse,” she continued, plucking up the winecup from her servant's tray and quaffing majestically. “And no, you'll not have felt it. Prizes if you find it—” She drained the cup and gave the servant a kick to fetch another. “—and whippings if you don't. Off you go!”

 

***

 

“...a gondola, Ambassador? I don't, ah, I've never ridden one of those...”

“Fierce beasts,” explained Sandoval, absently stroking the fur of the rug he shared with the young porter. It occupied one of several secluded niches in the throne room; not so secluded that he couldn't see and be seen by everyone, of course. “Very fierce. This pelt nearly cost me my life. To hunt a gondola you plant a field of sunflowers, you see, on account of their poor eyesight, and then you put on a hat with a yellow brim...”

“Sir.” That was one of his orderlies, who bowed as was appropriate but not QUITE as vehemently as Sandoval might have liked. “You may not have heard Mistress inform the party that there is a prize to be claimed by the one who finds the pearl she's hid up someone's arse in a sorcerous manner—”

Sandoval noted the pause, and paused himself in the action of reaching for one of his earrings. It was an opal, but surely he could blame the effects of his digestion

“—ah, sir. It's a very _large_ pearl.”

“Ah. Thank you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well!” said Sandoval, rising and briskly re-wrapping his ceremonial raiment. It was, in fact, a tablecloth. “I suppose I'd best get hunting then.”

The porter, still sprawled on the rug, looked up petulantly. “It _could_ be up mine, you know. I mean, there's no reason for it not to be. We could check.”

“Oh, sweeting,” said Sandoval, crouching down to chuck the lad affectionately under the chin. “Of course it's not. Where's the narrative charm in that? Far more likely to be up mine—” the porter's eyes lit up “—but that's far too obvious, wouldn't you say? The exotic foreigner? The charismatic yet louche diplomat, already a close personal friend of the plundering despot, his true motives unknown? No, poppet. That pearl occupies the dim reaches of another.”

Grumbling, the porter began to retrieve the bits of his uniform scattered about. Sandoval paced, twisting the tuft of hair under his bottom lip. Time was of the essence, of course, and he couldn't get his fingers up everyone before someone else got there first, so how to narrow the field further? What would Mistress do? More importantly, what would be the most interesting option imaginable?

One of Mistress's guards? Unlikely; they had their duties.

The Gar emissaries? They were in poor shape for adventures at the moment.

One of the doctors, perhaps? One of them even now was...well, writhing...out of one of their hidden passages into the throne room. A panel in the wall barely ten meters away had nudged open from the inside to admit her before swinging shut again on a translucent, fleshy protrusion that might have been a tail. The doctor's face briefly changed expression to something that Sandoval supposed meant irritation. Then she moved on with a fluid shimmy and the tail remained, caught in the latch. It twitched.

Well, that would be  _interesting_ , wouldn't it? But if the guards were off the menu the doctors were too. Nevertheless, he took a moment to watch as she approached Mistress's throne to hiss something in her ear. The doctors had done a really lovely job on the poisonings, after that other party not too long ago. Pity about the poor little suckling—the pig, of course, not the apprentice.

...the apprentice. Of COURSE! That had narrative charm for certain, that was _piquant_ —the poor, suffering apprentice, cut off from an entire realm of sensual experience by his Mistress, trained by long experience to be wary of any who offered...what a chase that would be! Like a bounding hart in the forest! And he, proud son of Xoan, he would bring that hart low with the skill of a born huntsman and claim his rightful prize!

Oh, this was going to be just perfect!

“You!” he called, pointing grandly at...oh, someone. A courtier. That one looked harmless, and was wearing no pants. “Go and fetch Mistress's apprentice. Bring him here to me.”

The courtier scurried off at once, apparently forgetting that Sandoval had no authority over him. Sandoval took a moment to adjust his wrap into a more rakish configuration and to muss his hair more artfully. Finally he arranged himself just so on the rug, casual yet commanding, and waited for the courtier to return. When he did, it was without the apprentice.

“Well?” Sandoval demanded.

“Ah, Am-ambassador,” the courtier stammered, “There's a guard posted at his door, and she said she'd cut my head and my balls off and have them switched and sewn back on if I tried anything.”

“Hmph. Dismissed.” Sandoval did relish the rare chance he got to say that. The courtier obeyed. Delightful!

What to do, then?

He rose to fetch something to drink while he pondered, which brought him past the tail caught in the wall—it still wriggled. He studied it. An idea began to form in his mind, and the clearer it became the surer he was that it was a very, very good idea. Perhaps the second or third best idea he had ever had. He would have the apprentice, who undoubtedly harbored a pearl of great value...and he'd need that tail to do it. Oh, how clever and dashing this all was! He tugged it free of the panel and strode across the throne room toward Mistress's seat of power, smiling.

The doctor was still informing Mistress of something; Sandoval ignored her for the moment and made grand obeisance to Mistress. She waved a handful of winecup at him impatiently. “What do you want?”

“I've solved the riddle of the pearl,” he said. “It's a metaphor for the virginity inside all of us hiding just out of reach, isn't it?”

“A novel thought,” said Mistress, before a hyena's grin crossed her face. “But...no. If you'd like a metaphor up your own arse, however, I'm sure I can think of something in just a moment.” Her fingers drummed thoughtfully on her codpiece.

“Doctor's orders, milady, I'm to avoid filigree. Speaking of which, may I?” He indicated the doctor to Mistress's side.

“Later, then,” said Mistress. A guard standing behind the throne made a note on a clipboard.

Once he and the doctor had gone far enough to be out of easy earshot in the saucy din of the party, Sandoval held up the tail. The doctor took it, cocked her head to one side, and abruptly opened her mouth wide enough to admit a dinner plate. The tail disappeared into it, tip-first. Sandoval swallowed reflexively.

“Thank you. Your bussinesss?”

“Ah. It's the apprentice. He's sick,” said Sandoval. “Deathly ill.”

She looked at him suspiciously, or rather she didn't actually look at him because her head-wrapping covered everything but her mouth, which was incapable of looking at him either suspiciously or otherwise. But something in her posture definitely conveyed that she smelt a rat.

“Isss he.”

“Yes.”

“Hhow do you know? He iss not hhere.”

“Because I've poisoned him,” Sandoval answered, simply.

“Again?”

“Well, yes.”

“Gif uss the antidote. We will attend to him.”

“I can't do that. This poison is a very particular poison, brewed in Xoan solely for my work here. Its only antidote is...” He sighed, and shook his head sadly. “...me.”

“...sss,” said the doctor, thoughtfully. “You."

“Yes!”

“We do not haff that compound in our sstores,” she said.

“After the party I'd be delighted to remedy that. In the meantime, it's imperative that you bring me to his quarters where he's no doubt suffering terribly at this very moment.”

She considered this for a few moments, then nodded. “Very well. Ffollow me.”

She returned to the same panel she'd exited from, which swung open to reveal a crawlspace through the wall: it was unlit, but just enough light from the throne room entered it to show that it branched and turned and formed a network. Sure enough, the doctors really could get nearly anywhere silently and unseen and back to their lair in the basements. There was almost certainly a passage from the throne room directly to the apprentice's private quarters. Sandoval would certainly have had one put in if it were _his_ castle, anyway.

The doctor led him through the crawlspace, which was much easier for her than for him. After the panel swung shut behind them the passage was pitch-black, and the jointing of Sandoval's legs was not set up for clambering through cracks the way the doctors' were. He managed to keep up through the twists and turns, barely, by following the slithering sounds she made as she went along. Other slithers, fainter, suggested that the rest of the medical staff was busy too.

“We are hhere,” said the doctor's voice in the darkness.

“Where's the door, then?”

“Hhere. It will not open.

“Push harder, then!” There was no answer; Sandoval heard a sibilant sound receding behind him and realized the doctor had decided her work was done. How she'd gotten around him without him feeling so much as a brush of that chilly skin was a question he'd like to know the answer to, but that could wait. What was important lay ahead, and there was just a panel between him and that goal: his tender hart, his fleeting wood-nymph, his arse-pearl, the apprentice.

“Telling!” said a tiny voice on the other side of the wall.

Sandoval ignored it, put his shoulder against the wall, and shoved hard. It barely budged.

“Telling Mistress!” came the tiny voice again.

“Tell her anything you like, crumpet,” he grunted, digging his heels in for better purchase. “As long as you tell her it was me.”

The panel finally gave. It gave much more suddenly than he'd expected, and more noisily: there was a half-second of terrible silence and then a great hollow crash of wood and the deafening high-pitched smash of innumerable pieces of glass. Then...wet sounds? Had he crushed Ivan, somehow? He leapt out into the light.

Ivan was at his desk. “Gwha? What the hell?”

A bookshelf lay on its side, where he'd tipped it by opening the panel behind it. Shards of broken glass glittered in the candlelight. So did a horde of tiny, hopping, creamy-looking little _things_. Were tho se meringues?

“TELLING!” they shrieked in unison, and dove past Sandoval's legs through the panel into the crawlspace. “TELLING MISTRESS!” echoed back down the passage.

...not meringues. Definitely not meringues.

Sandoval had seen those things before. He'd seen LOTS of those things before. It was impossible to forget the week when Mistress could barely go an hour without a blob of semen leaping up to splash on her face. Then she'd ransomed Ivan, and they'd stopped. And they'd all been spared being burnt alive by Mistress, which he'd enjoyed very much. And all had been well ever since—except that at least a hundred of the little things had just hopped past him. It took him half a second to realize how executed he'd be if Mistress found out about him loosing them, and another half second to realize that he had an extraordinarily finite amount of time until she inevitably did.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he said. It was probably the least clever thing he'd ever allowed to pass his lips. And he started running.

“Wait!” Ivan called behind him as he body-checked the door open and bolted past the startled guard in the hall. “How did you ge—

Sandoval ignored the apprentice, ignored the rapid feet and the babble of questions behind him, and made for the throne room. His life depended on him getting there before the not-meringues did, and that depended on them taking longer to get through the walls than he did running the halls at a dead sprint. He thought he could. He hoped he could. Oh, for the love of all that was good in the world, he was so going to die, and it was going to _hurt_...

“MISTRESS!” he shouted, pelting into the throne room at full speed.

“MISTRESS!” came a chorus behind him as wave upon wave of not-meringues poured through an open panel in the wall. “MISTRESS, WANKING!”

Mistress didn't so much as blink; she pushed a courtier from between her knees and stood up straight to watch him barrel toward her, scattering revelers as he went. The not-meringues pelted along behind him, and Ivan behind them. So help him, Sandoval thought the not-meringues might be gaining.

“MISTRESS!” he called again, desperately. “DUCK!”

She didn't. A flick of the eyes to one of the guards at her side, and otherwise she might have been enjoying a pleasant breeze. One eyebrow was raised, though he was in no position to appreciate it.

“TELL-” They leaped as one!

He was almost to the throne! “It wasn't me-”

“-LING!”

The guard stepped forward just as he mounted the steps of Mistress's dais, seized his arm, and twirled him expertly around. The last thing he saw, before everything went white, was a hundred pairs of tiny eyes and a hundred grinning mouths bearing down on him in a glutinous wave.

...unfortunately, he lived.

“Noble,” chuckled Mistress as he stood up after the cataclysm, dripping. He'd borne the brunt of it—the splash had bypassed her entirely. The guard shook muck off her hand.

A sprite raised itself out of the goo on his shoulder and squeaked “He was _wanking_ , Mistress! Apprentice was _wanking_!” Sandoval tried to give it a dirty look. It didn't work.

“Of course he was, cumsprite,” said Mistress. “APPRENTICE.”

A brief tumult at the back of the room eventually produced Ivan, dressed in his nightclothes and flanked by more guards. “He just broke in! I have no idea what's going on, but I didn't do anything!”

Mistress leaned forward to trail a finger through the still-warm semen on Sandoval's collarbone, and studied Ivan narrowly over the top of the ambassador's head. “Is this yours, apprentice?”

“Well, yes, but-”

“After my explicit instructions?”

“Yes, Mistress, but-”

“Clean him.” The tiny blob on her finger made an even tinier “wheee” sound and leapt to join its brother on Sandoval's shoulder. “Yourself. By mouth.”

Sandoval wiped a hand across his forehead. “Oh, I say, that's awfully generous of you-”

“No fucking!” she added cheerfully. Sandoval's face fell. “Go on, off you go.”

 

And that's exactly what they did. It took Ivan the better part of the night to finish mouthing the Xoan Ambassador, who enjoyed himself thoroughly. Despite Mistress's orders, Ivan was in the end forced to resort to a towel because the mess would not stop _running away from him and laughing_. And everyone lived happily ever after.

 

FIN!

 

**********

 

THE NEXT MORNING...

 

“Well, spit it out,” Sandoval chided the porter

The porter did. It went 'plink'. It gleamed in the morning sunlight.

“Oh,” said Sandoval. “Well, I suppose sometimes the obvious answer _is_ the right one.”


End file.
